Banal Nightmare

In Butler’s cutting latest (after The New Me), an aimless young woman leaves Chicago for the Midwestern university town where she grew up. Fleeing her toxic boyfriend, Nick, and a city she’s come to see as an “enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect,” Moddie plans to reconnect with her high school friends and make new ones, but she frequently alienates people with her unfiltered speech and strong opinions (her criticisms of “tedious” celebrity interviews on NPR cause her friend Pam to look at Moddie as if she were “incoherently ranting about the CIA”). The men in the novel—other characters’ partners and an artist who claims he invented New Media, whom Moddie humiliates during a game of air hockey—are for the most part cartoonishly vile. There are tender moments, too, as Moddie opens up to Pam about Nick’s emotional abuse and her failures as an artist. For all of Moddie’s anarchic energies, her character arc feels conventional, though it serves as a vehicle for Butler’s laser-sighted satire of millennial conformity. This sharply funny novel pulls no punches. (July)